


fever to tell

by csoru



Category: Generation Kill
Genre: Breathplay, M/M, Under-negotiated Kink
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-24
Updated: 2016-04-24
Packaged: 2018-06-02 13:36:36
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6568387
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/csoru/pseuds/csoru
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Afterwards — after the dust settles and Ray throws himself into the seat next to Brad, drumming his fingers on the tabletop and letting the blood from his busted lip drip all over it, proof as good as any that he was raised by roaming wild dogs — afterwards, Brad takes him home.</p>
            </blockquote>





	fever to tell

There is an itch under his skin, a frayed tension like unexploded ordnance and almost as lethal.

Friday night is a typical affair, for what it is: the last remnants of damp cold seeping out of their bodies, nosebleed-slow, after a four week long training exercise in the western Pacific. They’re spending it together more, it seems, out of an automated instinct than any real need or desire to socialise, with each other or with anyone else. Brad, other than have a beer in peace, wants nothing more than to stretch his legs after days and days of cramped spaces and the tiny amphibious vessels conducive only to using his knees as a chin rest. All he wants is space to breathe, to get as much air in his lungs as possible without needing to think about the limits of the closed air circulation of a rebreather. For the foreseeable future, he’s done quantifying potential disasters and granting each the space of one ridge of his spine until the combined weight pulls his back impossibly straight.

The bar is not a dive only by virtue of lacking a few homeless bums and jittery crackheads, though its saving grace might just be the proximity to Pendleton. Anywhere further south and it would be home to the worst, the unwashed, and the terminally liver-damaged. The bar top is coated with several layers of dirt and spilled alcohol, and every time the bartender tries wiping it down he achieves nothing except to move all the filth around.

Brad crosses his ankles under the table. He leans back in his seat, arms spread on the backrest in a calculatedly nonchalant display of ownership: there are six marines around, military breeding obvious in the ease with which they take up space and the wild invincibility in their eyes, and anyone looking at Brad will know they belong to him. He settles into the seedy warmth of the bar and the persistent chill of his beer, the cursing and laughter and shitty alt rock Americana music all bleeding together into a comforting monotony of white noise, even if the last thing he wants is comfort.

“Yo, Iceman.”

He tips his head back, looking at Poke approaching with his own beer in hand, and keeps watching from underneath raised eyebrows. The stone cold stare has little effect. It’s refreshing that Poke doesn’t go for physical intimidation and dick-swinging, and after Afghanistan, with the scuttlebutt on base beginning to solidify into a concrete possible location for their next deployment, Brad is wondering what strings he could pull to get Poke assigned to bravo company despite his not being in recon.

“Your boy’s about to get all his teeth kicked in,” says Poke, gesturing with his beer towards the pool table, where a scene is unfolding with hairpin trigger inevitability.

A man approximately six feet tall, whom Brad categorises as not military and therefore not a threat by the way he carries himself and the looseness of his posture, is mouthing off at one of his marines — at Ray, specifically, Ray who is all bones and whipcord muscle, and who needs to look up to maintain eye contact, the guy deep in his personal space and looming. Even at this distance Brad can tell they are about fifteen seconds from a bloody brawl.

Even at this distance he can see Ray’s mean, anticipatory glee, and the sheen of sweat over the sides of his neck and soaking into the collar of his shirt, the half-empty bottle of beer stood on the edge of the pool table. He can see almost as well as he can feel the hunger pouring off Ray, tangible, touchable, and then the poor anonymous fucker is snapping his pool cue over his knee and miming a swing. Ray grins widely enough it’s a wonder his face doesn’t split in half, expression shiteating and delighted.

Brad gives the developing scene all of the due attention it deserves and says, with a studious lack of inflection, “If Person can’t handle this mouthbreathing special ed reject on his own, I will gladly write him up for bringing untold shame to us all.”

For a bare second Poke’s expression goes slack with incredulity, but he regains his amusement quickly. He gives Brad a look like he thinks Brad is as sick as Ray, if not more.

Pleased, Brad leans forward, taking a swig of his beer. He doesn’t say anything when Ray takes the first hit and rolls with it, shifting his weight onto the balls of his feet and spitting blood onto the pool table, and he doesn’t start grinning outright until Ray lands his first punch. It’s telling that he goes for the gut instead of someplace more productive in terms of inflicting instant damage — windpipe, kneecaps, solar plexus, jaw — the way he’s trained to, the way all of them are. It’s telling that he moves against the instincts beaten into him: it means he wants to get hurt, first. It means he wants it to last, and that he wants to put on a show, a car crash trajectory of sheer, twisted indulgence.

It would be rude to let his effort go to waste. Brad finishes his beer and watches as his mouthy, underfed slip of an RTO lays an uncontested smackdown on a guy twice his size, voyeur to the kind of violence only Ray could perform with the permissive care and deliberation of a striptease.

…

Afterwards — after the dust settles and the rest of his boys disperse and the man Ray fucked up slinks off to the parking lot to lick his wounds and Ray throws himself into the seat next to Brad, drumming his fingers on the tabletop and letting the blood from his busted lip drip all over it, proof as good as any that he was raised by roaming wild dogs — afterwards, Brad takes him home.

“You got a weekend pass?” he asks, keeping Ray in his peripheral vision.

Ray has slumped over on the passenger side, ass nearly at the edge of the seat and one knee pulled up to his chest. The wide, easy spread of his legs has him taking up more space than his frame would otherwise warrant.

“Four days. I gotta sign back in on Wednesday.”

“You’re not staying at my fucking house.”

Ray flashes him a grin, a knowing one, and its mocking edges make Brad bite down on a smile of his own.

“That is total bullshit, man, you think I don’t know where we’re going?” The picture of innocent abandon, Ray toes off one of his sneakers to put his foot on the dashboard. He flexes his toes. “I should sharpie my name all over your couch. I own that bitch.”

In the light falling into the car from the street outside, the blood on Ray’s teeth looks black, slick and oily where it gets caught in neon glare. He can barely see out of his right eye, and his grin is crooked from the swelling bruises across his jaw, but he hasn’t flinched yet; nothing seems to be damaged too badly. By now, the front of his shirt is striped with blood. It’s a good look for him. Brad forces his gaze back to the road ahead.

“You need a goddamn ice pack and probably some stitches,” he says. “I can’t have you showing up back at Margarita looking like you got trampled by whatever farm animal you were trying to stick your cock in.”

“All this sweet talking just to get me alone, Brad? Sneaky, dude, very sneaky. My mom always warned me off pussy-ass trust fund Cali dicksucks like you.”

“You shouldn’t give that advice too much credence, Ray. It’s coming from the woman who likely exposed you to hard drugs in utero, not to mention every STD within spitting distance of whatever shitsville trailer park you hail from.”

Ray barks out a laugh and then keeps laughing for another beat or two or four, loud and obnoxious and fuelled by the simmer of adrenaline still nearly tangible in his bearing. His voice is hoarse from the bruising his throat has taken. The hiccuping hyena wheeze subsides once he seems to start hurting more than he was already, and he curses under his breath, rubs one palm over the left side of his ribcage, breath coming out in a faint hiss.

“Hey, did you break anything?” Brad asks, because he has to, and briefly wonders if he has enough supplies at home to try impromptu field surgery on a fractured bone, but Ray only shakes his head, says, “Nope, not even cracked. I had worse from Kocher, like, last week,” even though the cut over his temple is oozing blood and every now and again he wipes his upper lip with the back of his hand, smearing dark stains over his face and palm each time.

After a moment of comfortable silence he starts humming, head tipped back to rest on the seat and eyes shut against the on-off flash of passing streetlights. It takes Brad several lines to realise what Ray is singing — _clowns to the left of me, jokers to the right; here I am, stuck in the middle with you_ — and since Ray can’t see him and no one will be the wiser or ever, ever know, Brad soundlessly mouths the words along.

He taps his fingers on the steering wheel, a jittery tic that’s unlike him, one-two, one-two, one-two. Four weeks is a while to be gone, and he is not ready to let go, not yet, with his heart still beating out a staccato rhythm of gunfire. He’s not the one who took the edge off by getting into a fight with a civilian; his edges are all sharp and cutting, ragged bone slivers poking out from underneath skin that is almost, almost, ready to be human again.

…

It’s past midnight when they get to Brad’s house, a little too quiet and a little too peaceful. Brad tosses his keys onto the nearest flat surface and gives Ray an ungentle push between the shoulder blades, in the general direction of the bathroom.

“C’mon. Go wash that shit off your face before you get hep b.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ, stop nagging, none of it’s mine.” Ray spits the words out over his shoulder, but obeys. He leans the door almost closed behind him, and his voice isn’t quite drowned out by the sound of running water when he yells, “You shoulda seen the other guy!”

“I have,” Brad yells back, picking up supplies to take back to the bathroom, antiseptic and some butterfly bandages, two packets of sutures he bummed from a corpsman months earlier, “and he was this close to wiping the floor with your skinny ass, you fucking runt.”

When he walks into the bathroom, Ray turns from the sink to grin at him, wide and lopsided. He’s rinsed the blood from his mouth, washed his face, and the wet collar of his dirty t-shirt rides low over his front, exposed skin sporting a darkening cartography of bruises. He’s slightly gaunt, slightly hollow-eyed in this light, with water running down his face and neck and pooling in the dip between his collarbones.

“Motherfucker, them’s fighting words,” he says, placid and only a little manic, loose-limbed in the wake of violence, either taking it or doling it out. “How dare you. Don’t make me kill you in your sleep.”

Brad tosses him an ice pack. “With what, your deadly wit? Sit the fuck down.”

“You think I’m playing, Colbert, but I know where you keep your knives.”

“It’s a house with a kitchen, Ray. A toddler could figure out where the knives are.”

Ray brushes his thumb against the side of his nose, conspiratorial, but settles down on the toilet seat and spreads his knees to make space for Brad, to give Brad access to his face. Brad sits on the edge of the bathtub, dumps his meagre first aid kit onto the floor, and gets to work. It’s easy, mechanical and quiet; surprisingly, blissfully quiet, but maybe Ray is not stupid enough to start running his mouth with Brad’s hands this close to bruises that must already hurt a fair amount. None of the cuts need stitches, at first glance, and none of them look like they might leave scars that won’t fade in a few weeks. The bleeding had stopped before Ray put his head under the tap, so all that’s left to do is clean the last of the dirt and dried blood, disinfect the places where skin was broken, and slap a few bandage strips over the worst of those: the bridge of Ray’s nose, high up across his right cheekbone, right temple.

Brad doesn’t notice — no, that’s not right. He does notice his heart rate steadily picking up, and the warmth spreading from his chest to the pit of his stomach and the pads of his fingers. At the start, he timed his breathing to the water dripping from the tap. Now each inhale and exhale matches Ray’s, the slide into trained equilibrium almost but not quite unconscious. Ray is watching him with lazy insolence, blinking slowly. His expression is opaque, eyes all pupil, and when Brad lays a steadying hand on the side of his neck, he can feel the rapid beat-beat-drum of his pulse.

“Give it to me straight, Iceman.” Ray’s adam’s apple shifts beneath Brad’s palm as he speaks. “How much time have I got left?”

Instead of replying, Brad presses his thumb into the soft hollow under Ray’s jaw, hard, and raises his eyebrows at the way Ray sways towards him, lips parting, moving on automatic: not in surprise, not in protest, and most definitely not in fear. Brad thinks of the coiled energy that he let loose at the bar, the way he waited for the first several hits to connect and grinned through the blood on his teeth. He lets himself shift his grip to be less impersonal, less mechanical, though no less firm. Ray tilts his head as he leans, doglike, into the touch, and doesn’t break eye contact.

The air in the bathroom is thick with the smell of blood and antiseptic, neither enough to drown out the other. It’s thick with tension, too, frayed wire and hairpin trigger inevitability again, though it might just be Brad: one foot balanced over the edge of a precipice, taut with want, and it could go either way. He doesn’t guard his expression. He lets Ray see.

“Shit. Yeah?” It’s little more than an exhalation of breath, but Ray still manages to make it half daring, half hopeful.

The wire snaps.

“Fuck, yeah,” says Brad, and hauls Ray in by the front of his blood-stained t-shirt, walks him back across the length of the bathroom, and pushes him up against the door. All the air rushes out of Ray’s lungs at the impact. He turns his pained grunt into a pained laugh.

“You sadistic motherfucker,” he drawls. “On the first date? Bradley, what would your mother say.”

She would say nothing; she wouldn’t ever know. Ray is not who Brad would consider bringing home to meet his parents, a picture of indecorum writ large in the fading burn scar on his neck from a hot shell casing, in fingers smelling like propellant and nicotine, in the soles of his dirty chucks held together with duct tape and a prayer. Through rising anticipation Brad wonders if his mother would assume Ray to be a charity case, or belated juvenile rebellion. He wonders if she’d be right.

Ray is staring up at him, almost a head shorter but unwilling to give an inch of ground, bruised and in pain, with a raw edge of vulnerability no one ever seems to look for except Brad. Brad leans his weight against him, presses him into the door hard enough to hurt, because Ray will be able to take it: he will treat it as a challenge and ask for more, take the dare and turn it on its head, an incessant push and pull. It’s never comforting. It’s so damn good.

He twists both hands in the front of Brad’s shirt, drag of cotton against Brad’s abdomen. “Fuck are you waiting for, a perfumed goddamn invitation?” He’s spreading his thighs before he even finishes talking, half-hard through the denim of his pants.

Grinning, Brad sinks to his knees. His hands remain steady as he undoes Ray’s jeans, yanks them down to his thighs, and doesn’t think too much about anything but the reckless need to do something he won’t be able to take back; to hesitate would make it obvious he has fuck all in terms of experience sucking cock, but the Corps beat hesitation out of him right alongside fear and self-preservation. He sits back on his heels and looks up at Ray, takes in the rapid rise and fall of his chest and the bloodless welt on his lower lip where he must have bitten it.

He grabs Ray’s hips and pins them to the door just as Ray is saying, “C’mon, Brad, it’s not gonna suck itself — oh, fuck,” and he shuts his mouth with an audible click. He breathes out harshly when Brad gets to work: hand at the base, stroking him to full hardness, trying to remember how he’s had it done to him, trying to process stimuli through the near-deafening pounding of his heart. When he gets his mouth on Ray’s cock, cataloguing the weirdness, the taste and smell and the strangled noises Ray is making above him, Ray’s hips shove forward. Brad pulls back before he can choke.

“Don’t make me tie you up,” he says, and slams Ray back against the door, gets one forearm across his stomach and pushes, hard. Ray bites off a curse, twitching in pain — his ribs must be killing him — but doesn’t protest, and doesn’t apologise, and even that does something to Brad, something he didn’t know he needed quite this much. He presses his face to the hollow of Ray’s hipbone, inhales, and tries to hide the feral twist of his mouth. “Hands where I can fucking see them, understood?”

“Take a chill pill, you OCD freak,” Ray mutters, then yelps, startled and undignified, when Brad bites his hip. He places his hands on the door, palms flat, fingers spread.

It’s easier when Brad tries again, leans forward and works his hand at the same time he works his mouth, lets Ray go to town on his mouth without care or finesse, sloppy and messy and so good Brad thinks he could yell without even having his own dick touched. It’s easier once he gets used to the jerky rhythm that Ray can’t help, hips twitching despite Brad still holding him down; gets used to the odd fucking taste and weight of someone’s cock on his tongue, to the cool stickiness of sweat at his lower back, to breathing shallowly through his nose and trying to relax his throat. An echoing mantra rattles around his skull, one side to the other and back again: _you’re sucking off a trailer-bred white trash corporal smarter than half the battalion, what would your CO say, who fucking cares, who fucking cares_.

It’s easier. It’s too easy. Brad is aching for more without knowing what it is that he wants. He lets the hand he’s got wrapped around Ray drift to hold him by the hip, then around to the small of his back, sweaty palm on sweaty skin, trying to get Ray to push harder, deeper, as far as he will go. Above, Ray makes a noise like he might die, cursing breathlessly, one long endless stream of consciousness punctuated with Brad’s name, and then he moves, too quick for Brad to process until he has Ray’s fingers pinching his nose. He can’t breathe. For a moment, instinct threatens to kick in: Brad feels hot all over, breaking out in a new sweat, scalding over hypersensitive nerve endings spitting electricity in every direction. He stops propping Ray up and slams his fist into the door, feels blood seep between his knuckles.

“C’mon, c’mon,” Ray is saying in a hoarse whisper, “you can take it, Brad, fuck, come on, take it,” and it’s the opposite of comfort and exactly right. Brad lets go like his strings have been cut, tension falling away to the roar of blood in his ears, the deafening noise of it, choking heat and pressure and adrenaline. His nose brushes the trail of coarse hair on Ray’s abdomen, and his jaw aches, skin too hot and stretched too thin over hollowed bones, chin wet with spit. He has to shut his eyes before they can start to water, tries to keep his throat from contracting, keep it easy and pliant, and lets Ray fuck his mouth hard enough to bruise, to hurt. The last time he felt half as good he was wringing a hundred and forty out of his bike, courting death on the wide open road.

He barely registers it when Ray finishes. Flashes of bright colour explode across his eyelids, and his lungs burn, heart slamming against his ribcage like something trapped and desperate to claw its way out. His hands itch. There is a sensation, like he’s falling. His vision goes dark, and he —

Ray backhands him, and he’s talking, individual words settling into a worried shape: “Brad. Brad, wake up. Hey, come on. Wake up.”

Brad forces his eyes to open. The bathroom around him drifts in and out of focus. He’s on the floor, no longer kneeling, held up by Ray’s hand curled around the back of his neck. He works his jaw, winces at the pain, and wipes uselessly at his mouth with the back of his palm. Swallows, once, twice. He’s going to feel all of this for a good, long while. He feels a little high, and wonders if it’s oxygen deprivation.

He focusses on Ray, on his bruised wide eyes, on the colour still high across his cheekbones, on the way he stares at Brad, shaken and off-balance as if Brad pulled every joint in his body ever so slightly out of alignment. He looks wrecked. He looks good. He looks so fucked out from a single sloppy amateur blowjob that Brad wants to mock him until the end of time.

Instead, he twists one hand in the bloody collar of Ray’s t-shirt and pulls him in for a wet, open-mouthed kiss that makes Ray plaster himself against Brad in a boneless sprawl. He seems more than happy to taste his own come on Brad’s tongue, something Brad never thought he’d witness outside of cheap porn. Ray keeps breathing soft little noises into his mouth, and they only serve to remind Brad that he is still, despite the bout of unexpected unconsciousness, hard. The kiss and the bruising clench of Ray’s fingers on his neck are enough to tell him he’s going to get his own, and when Ray brushes his knuckles over the place where Brad’s jeans are obviously straining, he grins against Brad’s mouth; it’s declarative.

When Ray pulls back to lean against the door, Brad is ready to get his feet under him again. He gets up on steady legs, ignores the fact that his hands are shaking. He makes an aborted move to wipe his split knuckles on his jeans before thinking better of it. He’d never get the stains out.

There is still a nervous edge to the way Ray is looking at him, as if he wants to ask or talk, but all Brad can think is that he’d like to taste blood, a little. All he can think is that he would maybe like to make Ray bleed, or make Ray make him bleed, no questions or apologies; it must show in his face, or something akin to it, because Ray’s jaw gets a resolute set that means he has made up his mind.

“Brad,” he says, cheerful and mocking, “I am so disappointed. How did you acquire these bona fide cocksucking virtuoso skills without ever telling your dear old pal Ray?”

“I took pointers from your mom.” Brad’s voice comes out sounding as if he’d swallowed a pound of gravel. He likes it. “And Ray? Don’t pick any more fights.”

“Are you kidding? If me fighting gets you this hot, I’m gonna beat up every able and willing motherfucker from here to San Diego.”

Brad bites the inside of his cheek to keep from grinning too widely, his mouth itchy and abused like the skin over his knuckles, and turns to the sink to make a show of washing spit and come off his face the same way Ray washed blood off of his.

…

In the end, Ray does crash at his place.

He doesn’t take the couch, and doesn’t sharpie his name onto any of Brad’s belongings. He doesn’t even spend that much time in Brad’s house over his four-day weekend, save for the nights. He comes back like a stray, with beers and shitty takeout, as if Brad needed to be wooed. He comes back with something feral lurking in his eyes and in the corners of his mouth, with smiles all teeth and a promise of mayhem, with jeans that ride too low on his hips, showing a fingerprint-spread of bruises. He comes back and lets Brad bleed the tension out of them both.

On Tuesday morning Brad drags him out of bed at zero four thirty, before tourists start swarming the beach like flies over fresh roadkill. Sunlight is barely a shiver across the sand.

“This is bullshit, Brad. There’s still stars out, what the hell is wrong with you? Did your parents never hug you? Fuck, I could be in bed right now.”

“It’s called expanding your horizons, something a goatfucking degenerate such as yourself will benefit from.”

“Expanding your upper middle class faggotry, more like. You’re totally abusing your authority over an enlisted man under your command.”

Brad smiles, breathing in salty morning air. Not unkindly, he says, “Ray, you wouldn’t acknowledge authority if it jacked off on your face. Now stop whining like a little bitch and get in,” and shoves Ray into the ocean.

Later, he’s unscrewing the tops off of two beers when Ray walks out of the water and towards him. He shakes himself all over, every bone loosened from its socket in counterpoint to the sharp angles of his body. Brad watches him, lazy and content. Ray might be bruised black and blue, but now Brad has laid his hands on each mark. Half of them would fit the outline of his palm, his fingers.

The itch under his skin is something poised and waiting to be lit up from the inside, and maybe that is precisely what Ray is: the thing that lights him up in this liminal space where nothing needs to be said or acknowledged to be real. Or he might be a rebellion after all, the kind certain to keep Brad on his toes. Enough to screw his career if he missteps, enough to keep the pound of adrenaline running, as good as going a hundred and forty on the interstate with nothing else around but the wide open horizon. The dark ink coating Ray’s skin stands out in the early morning light. It’s as familiar as the bruises spreading over his ribs and arms and neck, as necessary as the mean twist of his mouth.

None of it is comforting and none of it easy, but it isn’t comfort and it isn’t ease that Brad needs.

Ray waves at him from across the small distance, squinting against the rising sun, and makes his way over.


End file.
